Keynote Address for
“What Works in Community Investing: A Community Development Summit”
November 8, 2013
Piper Auditorium, Harvard Graduate School of Design
By
Lizabeth Cohen
Dean, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Dept. of History
Harvard University
Thank you, Eric Belsky and Ellen Seidman, for inviting me to speak at this exciting
summit. It’s not every day that a historian has an opportunity to talk to policy makers. I feel as
if I come bearing greetings from the land of “what worked (or not) in the past” to the land of
“what might work in the future.” Although I am not a believer in popular axioms like “history
repeats itself” or “those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it,” I do think the
past can be instructive and I will do my best today to suggest some ways that history is relevant
to the important “What Works” project, based on my own research in twentieth-century US
history.
Let me begin by asserting that I think we are at a moment of crisis in urban
development in the US that starkly mirrors the 99 vs. 1 percent divide put on the map by the
Occupy Movement. With my contribution to this Summit in mind, I encountered three pieces of
disturbing evidence over the last few weeks that I’d like to share with you. The first was an
article in The Nation magazine of October 21, 2013, by Ken Silverstein, entitled “Miami, Where
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Luxury Real Estate Meets Dirty Money.”1 What attracted my attention here was the focus on
Sunny Isles Beach, commonly dubbed “Florida’s Riviera” and filled with luxury condominiums
and resorts and high-end retail stores. What had been a modest resort community of low-rise
motels and small apartment buildings catering to ordinary tourists and retirees was
transformed after 1997, when real estate developers and other business groups managed to
pass a referendum incorporating a simple neighborhood into a separate town. Building,
planning and zoning decisions were then removed from the Miami-Dade County Commission
and turned over to the independent jurisdiction of Sunny Isles Beach City Commission, a
corporate-type entity currently made up of a real estate executive, a property lawyer and a
former advertising executive. The Trump-dominated development that followed was described
by author Silverstein rather unabashedly as “a property developer’s wet dream.”
Lest you say that mile-square Sunny Isles Beach is an extreme case of corporate
profitmaking dangerously undermining civic authority and a broadly conceived community
interest, let me share evidence #2 and #3. Number 2 is an article I encountered in the October
issue of Alaska Airlines Magazine when flying recently from Boston to San Diego.2 The article
was entitled “The New Town Square,” and it sang the praises of “Neighborhood-friendly
developments [that] are changing America’s urban and suburban landscapes.” What followed
was an exuberant expose of the mixed-use projects that are popping up in downtowns all over
America, “creative combinations of upgrades to existing buildings along with high density new
construction,” where “some of the most appealing projects are zoned for retail, restaurant and
office use, as well as including housing.” The reader then was treated to vivid descriptions of
developer-driven downtown fantasy lands of restaurants and cafes, exclusive shops, and
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expensive condominiums in places as diverse as Salt Lake City, Utah; Maui, Hawaii; Seattle,
Washington; and San Marcos and Emeryville, California. The article concluded by registering
approval of this growing “new type of real estate development…that expresses a sense of place
and meets the needs of its many constituents.”
And finally, evidence #3 was the cover story in the San Francisco magazine I found in my
hotel room just this past week, “Dizzy, Delirious Development: 50 Views of a Radically Changing
City,” which focused on “the 50 groundbreaking, zeitgeist-revealing projects that are reshaping
San Francisco right now,” they being only a fraction of the 150 major real estate developments
under construction in the city, with another 145 or so going through the approval process. 3 (I
should add that I woke up the morning after election day to a San Francisco Chronicle headline
“High-rise project loses big at polls,” announcing that determined voters had managed to beat
back a developer’s plan to construct high-rise luxury condominiums on the San Francisco
waterfront, overturning approval from the Board of Supervisors, which claimed to have blessed
the project for its contributions to the affordable housing fund and anticipated future revenues
to the city.4 Victorious organizers against the project denounced this as a deal with the devil.) I
share these stories because I think it is important that we bear THIS BOOMING urban scene in
mind as we probe the very different urban world inhabited by many of the 47 million living in
poverty (15% of all Americans and 20% of American children), the 48 million who are
dependent on food stamps to put food on the table, the 48 million without health insurance,
and the long lists of those waiting for affordable housing through public housing or Section 8
Housing Choice vouchers. We seem closer than ever in the United States to Benjamin Disraeli’s
warning of the dangers of two nations (and I remind you of his mid-nineteenth-century quote),
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“between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other's
habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of
different planets. The rich and the poor.”5
This reality of two urban Americas , which I hardly need to describe any further to those
assembled here today, leads me to make a provocative statement in the fall of 2013, not long
after the federal government shut itself down and has only been resuscitated on borrowed
time and money and when many state governments are facing assault by right-wing, antigovernment forces. But here it is: the only way I can see to achieve the kind of integrated,
collaborative approach to community development that addresses the economic needs of the
whole of cities and metropolitan areas—the kind of thought and action being advocated by the
authors of Investing in What Works for America’s Communities—is to re-awaken Americans’
confidence in government and the public sector.6 With all due respect to the local non-profits
and the national-level philanthropies represented here today, many of whom are trying their
hardest to compensate for the growing influence of the private development forces I just
discussed at the start of this talk and to fill a void created by the vicious attacks unleashed on
government over the last few decades, I see no substitute for an effective public sector
empowered to speak and act for the common good. The book we are here to discuss today has
helped me appreciate the impressive ways that non-profit- and even private-sector actors are
applying their tools and strategies to help make communities work better, but I think there are
limits to what is possible without the partnership and even—to use the language of this book—
the quarterbacking of responsible government. In fact, government is little mentioned in this
volume, and I think we can understand why, given its 2012 copyright. But I invite you to take a
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journey with me through the twentieth century, to remind yourselves of the critical role good
government has played at crucial moments in building American communities that work for the
99, not just the 1, percent.
First stop on our journey is another moment in the 20 th century when ordinary
Americans found themselves in big trouble: unemployment was sky high, homelessness was
growing, hunger was rampant, and the safety net--to the extent it existed--was stretched
beyond capacity: that moment was the Great Depression of the 1930s.7 By the end of the
decade, the New Deal had created a strange new world of an American-style welfare state with
a social security system for retirees, dependent women and children, and the disabled;
unemployment insurance for those without work; minimum wages and hours for many kinds of
labor; protection of the right to organize industrial unions; stronger defense of the rights of
consumers; construction of the first public housing; and more. There were many flaws in how
these programs were designed and implemented. And it is fashionable among historians to
stress the limitations rather than the achievements of the American approach to government
provision of social welfare. But that misses, I think, the more important lesson. Despite
tremendous opposition by corporate America to the expansion of the public sector and a
populace that itself had limited experience and expectation of receiving help from a more
activist government (after all, many Americans in the 1930s were first- and second-generation
immigrants who had rarely voted in national elections and whose experience of local and state
government consisted of getting a favor from the local machine boss in exchange for a vote)—
still the vast majority of Americans by the end of the New Deal had gained new respect and
confidence in government. The 1930s and 1940s were a different time in the United States and
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the path to people’s political reorientation was unique to that moment. The social movements
orchestrated by a grassroots-oriented national Democratic Party and an ambitious labor
movement could not be replicated in the 21st century. But the point is that over the course of a
decade, people’s expectations about where to look for help, whom they could count on, what
they were entitled to as citizens, and how communities could be made fairer shifted
dramatically. It wouldn’t happen the same way today, but it could happen again if those who
advocated for “investing in what works” made a priority of arguing that there is no substitute
for the neutral hand of a government remaining responsibly accountable to the people and
their best interests.
Next stop on this journey takes us to the quarter century after World War II—from say
1948 to 1973—an era in the aftermath of World War II marked by aspirations to achieve
national affluence and to win the Cold War by incorporating as many Americans as possible into
widespread prosperity. Elsewhere I have called this vision a “consumers’ republic” for how the
pursuit of traditional American ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy became linked to
the goal of incorporating all into a mass consumer economy. 8 This was an agenda that many
different interests in American society bought into---from corporate America to elected officials
to organized labor, which partly judged its own success by the expansion of workers’ purchasing
power. Built in to how the consumers’ republic played out were many limitations, particularly
the persistence of inequality alongside the ideal of inclusion, which I have explored extensively
in my book A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.
Overdependence on the property tax to deliver crucial services like schools, the privatization of
downtowns in shopping centers, and other unfortunate developments undercut the
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progressive potential of the consumers’ republic. But the important point I want to make here
is that an acknowledgment prevailed that achieving a prosperous America required the broadbased prosperity of all Americans. And government policies played a crucial part in delivering
that prosperity. Urbanists are rightfully quick to condemn the fragmenting suburbanization
created by the National Highway Act or the segregated metropolitan areas brought about by
the red-lining embedded in FHA and VA mortgage programs, but let’s not forget the other ways
that progressive redistribution of income took place and a more activist government was
empowered in this era: through a progressive income tax compared to today, with the highest
tax rate set at 90% and never dipping below 70% from the 1950s through the 1970s; a more
robust estate tax where the top marginal rate stayed at 77% until 1976; social security more
aligned with the cost of living in retirement; and the federal passage of extensive consumer,
environmental, and other regulatory and protective legislation that would--by the end of the
twentieth century--be dismissed as the too-long arms of the nanny state.
The third moment on this historical journey that I want to stop at is at an example that
is closely aligned with our discussion today, focused as it is on urban revitalization. And my
invocation of it as any kind of a model may surprise you, given its poor reputation within
urbanist circles. Yet here goes: I propose that there was a time when government, particularly
the federal government, took responsibility for the survival of cities; appropriated funds to
improve the availability and quality of affordable housing and to promote job-producing
economic investments; and linked the provision of better social services—job training, legal
services, presschooling, and the like—with the improvement of the urban infrastructure. That
moment was the era of federal urban renewal from the early 1950s until the early 1970s. I
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want to make clear that there were many aspects of urban renewal that I roundly condemn: I
think most of us would agree that there was too much blanket destruction of the old fabric of
the city and too much insensitive construction of the new. The fixation on modernist concepts
and design often overly emphasized the car, led to isolating and alienating towers-in-the-park
and superblocks, and encouraged buildings constructed more as statements than liveable
environments. And frequently community participation in planning received more lip-service
than attention. BUT I am learning through the book I am currently writing, titled Saving
America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban American in the Suburban Age, that
we should be alert in the urban renewal era to more variation over time and place, more
learning on the job, more innovative experimentation, and--most relevant for today’s summit—
a surprising amount of effort to address just the concerns voiced by the editors and authors of
Investing in What Works, specifically three things that stand in dramatic contrast to today’s
agenda-setting by private developers that I mentioned earlier:
1. Strategies aimed at integrative and collaborative efforts to address urban ills, with
public officials serving as quarterbacks even when private sector investment was a
necessity as means and ends in the urban renewal project;
2. A prioritizing of the kind of economic revitalization that would create jobs for
workers of diverse social classes, not simply seeking an elite niche market or
operating on the small scale of a neighborhood;
3. A deep recognition (if no easy strategy for undertaking it) of the need for
metropolitan-wide solutions to the difficult problems faced by cities and city
dwellers.
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Let me take each of these three areas briefly in turn and show you how Ed Logue--in his
urban redevelopment work in New Haven in the 1950s, Boston in the 1960s, and New York City
and New York State in the 1970s and 1980s—placed a premium on just the kinds of concerns
we are discussing here today, even if not all of his planning and design solutions would appeal
to our modern day hearts and minds. What I hope to leave you with, however, is a stronger
confidence that “it CAN happen here.”
Let’s start with how Logue and his colleagues in New Haven in the 1950s came to
recognize that, as they undertook the urban renewal of neighborhoods with deteriorated
housing, they were encountering what they called “multi-problem families” unreached by
existing social agencies in the city.9 Logue thus invited an old acquaintance, Paul Ylvisaker of the
Ford Foundation, to visit New Haven and learn more about the complex, multi-faceted
problems poor people in New Haven faced. What resulted was Ford’s Gray Areas Program,
which funded Community Progress Incorporated (known as CPI) in New Haven and similar
programs in five other cities. Logue would in fact establish a similar initiative with Ford support
when he came to Boston to head an expanded Boston Redevelopment Authority (or BRA) in
1961—here known (and still with us today) as ABCD. Although far from perfect, CPI as
developed under Mike Sviridoff (who would later take over for Ylvisaker at Ford and serve as
the first president of LISC) became an incubator for many of the community action programs
that would become signatures of President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s War on Poverty in the
mid-1960s, such as Jobs Corps, Headstart, and Neighborhood Legal Services.
9
In addition to pioneering an integrative approach to the problems of poor urban
residents, Logue’s efforts in New Haven and elsewhere are significant today for how he insisted
that public officials needed to be in charge, fulfilling that “quarterbacking” role prescribed in
Investing in What Works. In fact, he and his colleagues in New Haven pioneered a new kind of
urban generalist expert who had broad skills in negotiating for the new kinds of resources
available at the national level and in overseeing a wide range of initiatives. In the case of urban
renewal 1950s-style, that expansive portfolio included urban planning, real estate, design,
construction, management, legal matters, public relations, community organizing, lobbying, and
more. In fact, Logue felt that the broad education in “public interest law” that he received at
Yale Law School served him particularly well. I should add that many observers at the time
recognized that a new kind of public official was emerging in the urban field, although they
shared no common label for this budding role. Time magazine dubbed the new field
“urbanology,” which journalist Fred Powledge defined as dominated by “educated, articulate
men [remember this was a half-century ago!] who had training or experience, or both
in…disciplines bordering on the behavioral sciences, along with an appreciation for and
understanding of practical politics, [and] were able to accumulate and use power in rebuilding
cities.”10 Even Jane Jacobs, who would become the leading critic of urban renewal and on
several occasions would single out Logue for criticism, applauded in her Death and Life of
American Cities of 1961 the broad general knowledge of the public officials she observed
working in New Haven. Rather than pursuing narrowly defined and isolated responsibilities in
what she called bureaucratic “labyrinths” and “fractionated empires,” in New Haven “agency
10
heads and their staff…can be experts in two matters simultaneously: they can be experts in
their own responsibilities and they can also be experts in the subject of New Haven itself.”11
Most crucially, Logue and his elected partner in New Haven—Mayor Richard Lee—and
in Boston—Mayor John Collins—insisted that although federal urban renewal was premised on
attracting private developers to invest in cities by minimizing the financial investment and risk
of undertaking projects in declining urban areas, public officials—not the real estate developers
and investors they recruited—should be in the driver’s seat. As Logue put it with his
characteristic bluntness, “I’ve always felt [you] can’t trust the private sector to protect the
private interest.”12 When I interviewed prominent architect I.M. Pei a few years ago, he
appreciated that even architects benefited from the presence of strong public redevelopment
administrators. As he looked back on his extensive work in urban renewal partnering with
William Zeckendorf from 1948 to 1960 in many American cities and close to our home, working
on the Government Center Plan in Boston, he lamented that when less federal dollars overseen
by public officials were in play, private-sector developers, overwhelmingly “interested in their
bottom line,” called more of the shots, often lobbing them at architects: “They want to be
celebrities themselves”….Back in the days of urban renewal, he recalled nostalgically, “The
developer, the architect, and the city and state [were] really working together. I’m not saying all
equal, but they [were] all important.” Pei regretted the greater authority that private-sector
developers have gained over projects at the expense of government administrators, architects,
and the public.13
11
Let me give you one final example from Logue’s career of an integrative approach to
trying to improve city life for residents. Governor Nelson Rockefeller brought Ed Logue to New
York in 1968 to head an innovative statewide urban renewal agency, called the Urban
Development Corporation (or UDC). Rockefeller felt thwarted in his effort to build more
affordable housing and to develop more industrial capacity in New York State as voters
defeated his bond issues at the polls. So he sought an alternative, which became the UDC, selffinancing through the issuing of its own bonds, to be backed by the “moral obligation” of New
York State, and endowed with enormous powers to employ eminent domain, override local
zoning and building codes, and make its projects tax exempt. The jewel in the UDC’s crown
became one of three new towns built in the state, the car-free “new town in town” of
Roosevelt Island, formerly Welfare Island in New York City’s East River. Here Logue
orchestrated, piecing together funding available at the federal and state levels, a mixedincome, mixed-use community, with public schools located within residential buildings to bring
social classes together; and with a wide mix of apartments and services to provide homes for
single working people as well as the elderly, the disabled, and large families. As Logue proudly
bragged in 1975 after the UDC defaulted on its bond payments and Logue was forced to resign,
“It was too good to last.…They felt threatened….I was engaged in—bankers said this—social
engineering. As if that’s a mortal sin. I was very proud of the fact that Roosevelt Island was a
total piece of social engineering.”14
A second goal that Investing in What Works actively promotes, and that the urban
renewers of the 1950s and 1960s like Logue shared, is to make sure that efforts at urban
revitalization include broad economic planning for a city’s economy and particularly for jobs
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available to a wide range of urban residents. That too was a goal in New Haven, which, as
Douglas Rae has powerfully demonstrated in his 2005 book CITY: Urbanism and Its End was
already decades into devastating deindustrialization by the 1950s, sadly just as African
Americans were arriving from the South in hopes of securing good industrial jobs.15 Although
urban renewal never provided enough of those good jobs and it brought new problems of its
own, redevelopment included developing a new wholesale food market and industrial district
at New Haven’s harbor alongside Interstate 95 and making major investments in downtown
retail to fend off competition from proliferating suburban shopping centers and keep consumer
dollars in the city. In Boston, Logue focused on creating more jobs downtown by prevailing
upon federal, state, and municipal governments to invest in a 60-acre Government Center and
then pressuring Boston’s business leaders to erect new office towers nearby. With the promise
of more workers downtown, the BRA goaded merchants to help renovate the city’s retail core
and launched plans to rehab and reuse Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market. City Hall and other
public buildings in fact were intentionally designed without extensive cafeterias to push
employees and their business out into the surrounding city. And in New York State, the UDC
developed industrial parks and undertook other strategies to create badly needed jobs in the
deindustrializing parts of the state. In Logue’s last big job as President of the South Bronx
Development Organization (SBD0), to which he was appointed by New York Mayor Ed Koch in
1978, he also made job creation a top priority, developing industrial parks to bring
manufacturing and commercial markets to the area.
The third and final goal I saw emphasized in Investing in What Works that was also
shared by Logue and the urban renewers of the 1950s to 1970s is perhaps the most intractable
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one: the ability to make and implement plans on a metropolitan, even regional, scale rather
than be constrained by municipal boundaries. The population of the New Haven suburban ring
increased 51% between 1950 and 1960, while the city’s population fell 7.5%, making it only
50% of the metropolitan area, and by 1970, only 39%. Given this stark reality, the redevelopers
in New Haven tried to create and empower metropolitan-level structures of governance,
development and taxation; as Mayor Lee put in 1955, “Social, economic, and human problems
do not stop at the artificial political boundaries which segregate our[metropolitan]
community.”16 Lee and Logue managed to create some semblance of a regional planning body
around the need to coordinate planning for the Highway 91 route through New Haven and its
northern suburbs, but their Quinnepiac Valley Development Corporation proved impossible to
sustain after that planning ended. In Boston, Logue was an early and vocal voice for a
metropolitan solution to the city’s highly segregated and unequally resourced schools. In New
York State, he went the furthest—and was repaid with a backlash that contributed significantly
to the ultimate undermining of the UDC itself. Frustrated in New Haven and Boston with the
exit of middle-class city residents to the suburbs to live and increasingly to work, leaving what
he saw as an unfair burden of solving social problems to cities and their remaining residents, in
1972 Logue introduced a “fair share” housing plan to construct 100 units of housing in 9
wealthy suburban Westchester communities. And he threatened to use the UDC’s power to
override local zoning if necessary. His project was met with a ferocious rejection, including
pressure put on the New York State legislature to curtail the UDC’s override powers in the
state’s villages and towns.
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I have tried to show you in this brief tour of key moments in 20 th century US history
times when government intervention has made a difference or at least made the effort to
achieve the kind of improvements in the lives of poor urban residents that you have set out in
this book and today’s summit to promote. My message is that government can—and I would
argue—should be a lead partner in investing in what works.
As foreign as this message may sound in today’s world, I would also suggest that at this
particular grim moment we may have a new opportunity, where the enemies of an activist
government and more robust public sphere may have gone too far. Might there be a silver
lining, I wonder, to the paralysis that anti-government forces have brought upon Washington
and that has inevitably seeped out into the far corners of the nation where dependence on
government runs deeper than critics would have us think? As we debate today various
entrepreneurial strategies for greater integration, collaboration, quarterbacking, economic
development, and metropolitan action, let’s not forget that almost all efforts can be made
more influential if backed by the political power, economic incentives, infrastructural
investments and democratic support of a robust public sector. While Washington, DC is a very
challenging nut to crack at this particular moment, two new progressive mayors have just been
elected in Boston and New York, cities that powerfully dominate their regions. My final words
to words to you as we head into an afternoon of discussion with terrific and experienced
panelists are, to use language that became a rallying cry for social scientists not so long ago
who were seeking to understand social change and politics, “bring the state back in.” Let’s
remind ourselves that in a democracy, government does belong to the people and therefore
it—and they—deserve the seat at the head of the table.
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1
Ken Silverstein, “Miami: Where Luxury Real Estate Meets Dirty Money,” The Nation, October
21, 2013, 12-23.
2
Debra Prinzing, “The New Town Square: Neighborhood-friendly developments are changing
America’s urban and suburban landscapes,” Alaska Airlines Magazine, October 2013, 122-36.
3
Ben Christopher, “Cranespotting: The 50 Groundbreaking, Zeitgeist-Revealing Projects That
Are Reshaping San Francisco Right Now,” San Francisco Magazine, November 2013, 86-97.
4
John Wildermuth, “High-rise Project Loses Big at Polls,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 6,
2013, A1, A12.
5
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benjamindi134330.html, accessed January 2,
2014.
6
Nancy O. Andrews and David J. Erickson, Senior Editors; Ian J. Galloway and Ellen S. Seidman,
Contributing Editors, Investing in What Works for America’s Communities: Essays on People,
Place & Purpose (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and Low Income Investment Fund,
2012).
7
See Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990) for discussion that follows on the Great Depression and the
New Deal.
8
See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar
America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) for discussion that follows on the postwar era I call a
consumers’ republic.
9
Discussion of Ed Logue’s urban renewal work comes from manuscript chapters of Lizabeth
Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the
Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, forthcoming).
10
Fred Powledge, Model City, A Test of American Liberalism: One Town’s Efforts to Rebuild
Itself (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), 22.
11
Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 410-13.
16
12
Linda Corman, “Former BRA Head Takes Another Look at the City He Helped Plan,” Banker &
Tradesman, October 21, 1987, 6.
13
Lizabeth Cohen, Interview with Ieoh Ming Pei, June 20, 2007, New York, NY.
14
Frank Jones, Interview with Edward J. Logue, April 1, 1999, Martha’s Vineyard, MA, Tape 3,
38.
15
Douglas Rae, CITY: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).
16
Richard C. Lee, “New Haven Plans for Tomorrow,” U.S.A. Tomorrow, January 1955, 15, in
Robert A. Solomon, “Symposium: Building a Segregated City: How WE All Worked Together,”
Saint Louis University Public Law Review, Vol. 16, no. 2 (1996-97), 283.
17